Mixtape & Cassette Tape Hats

A mixtape was a constraint before it was a playlist. As Austin Kleon puts it, how long the mix is depends on how long the original tape is, so every song had to earn its minutes. Making one meant keeping the clock radio tuned to the Top 40 station, having the tape recorder ready with fresh batteries, and hitting record the moment one of the songs came on, a routine a Scary Mommy 1983 how-to spells out step by step. Forum veterans still remember learning to hate DJs who talked over the intro, and the pencil-and-cassette image, captioned "our children will never know," circulates as a generational-gap meme. The format is back too: cassette sales roughly doubled from 2020 to 2021, from 173,000 to 343,000, according to Luminate figures cited by Fortune. These mixtape and cassette tape hats wear that history. Two plain badges, MIXTAPE and CASSETTE TAPE, carry the searched terms. The sentence designs cover the pencil rewind, the hours spent by the radio to tape one song, the DJ talking over the intro, the mixtapes made for people who did not deserve them, the argument that a playlist is not a mixtape, and Side A bangers against Side B feelings. This page is the cassette as the instrument of a whole childhood, distinct from Old School Hip-Hop, Vinyl Record Collector and Physical Media. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat. Give one to the parent who still has the tapes in the attic.